No, it wasn’t as big, say as carnival trucks pulling into the fairgrounds with tents and tilt-a-whirls to erect, but this was at the end of cold dead December— not August— and therefore all the more crucial when the

Riverside Texaco pick-up would first trundle out onto the cove (on ice at last officially sanctioned “safe enough”) and begin off-loading six-warm-months’ worth of discarded tires and then dousing the black pyramid with kerosene… meaning that when the sun went down,

that ol’ bonfire black-magic would draw in those pretty-in-pink, varsity crowd, glamour girls in their new, white Christmas-present skates (even a few with their mittens tucked all warm-snuggly into the sleeves of one of those white-fur muffs you never see any more

except on the old Currier and Ives Christmas cards… and me a shabby small-fry costumed up as some Charles Dickens’ waif in overlarge hand-me-downs… red-and-black flannels and wools, and those black second-hand hockey skates… yeah, me, looping round

about the flames and the beauties like some dark little bat, imagining in my Hollywood heart: I’m some silver-skated Hans Brinker: Look at me! Checkme out! Skating backwards over here! Watch this!

Until the excruciating pain of frostbitten toes cinched tourniquet-tight in socks soaked in melting ice water over the passing hours left me in utter defeat… to limp lamely homeward from the arena... largely undiscovered… as always…